Jim, I sense what you are grappling with. Sorry, I am a Seagate fanbois. I just bought 4x Seagate 500GB 'Constellation' drives. I payed $130 ea. for them at the egg. I accept this. I believe that these are 'enterprise' rated. They do have a 5yr warranty. They will be used in a pair of new NAS in RAID1 (mirror).
If you choose to build a large local RAID-based storage system, I can not see why you would buy any MFG HD that is not 'enterprise' rated. Well, unless you like swapping drives. You may wish to search for HD's rated for 'surveillance' duties. Yes, these are also used in TIVOs and DVRs too! I also use a 4yr old pair of these HDs also (500GB). No problems whatsoever. Can not buy replacements any more. 1TB EM HDs scare me still. 2TB EM HDs just plain freak me out. Now, I read 3TB EM HDs floating out to us. Fine. Then, there is the new SSD craze ATM. YMMV. JMHO. Duncan On 07/03/2012 15:35, James Maki wrote:
I have been out of the hard drive market since the flooding created insane prices last year. It seems we are down to basically 2 choices, Seagate and WD. For mass storage, I had been going with the Samsung 2TB "EcoGreen" model, with great success. They have now been purchased by Seagate and have only a 1 year warranty, a bit of a disappointment. I also have a number of 1 TB WD Black Caviar units that have given great service. The 2TB model is almost 2x the price of the Samsung/Seagate and WD Green models. Lastly, I have several Hitachi 1TB 7200 RPM units that have not given me any issues. I am looking at building a new system for media storage and am trying to determine the best approach. I am thinking on building on a hardware RAID card to reduce the number of "partitions" (right now I have 21 "drives", "partitions" and "DVDs," ranging from C: to W:, almost exhausting the alphabet of available designations) and provide "automatic" backup. I have read that many drives don't like hardware RAID cards unless you go with to the ultra-expensive Enterprise drives. This system would not be designed for speed (the 5400 RPM Samsungs streams movies without a problem), but safety and reliability. I was looking at the Areca ARC-1223-8I PCI-Express 2.0 x8 Low Profile SATA / SAS 8-Port PCIe 2.0 Internal SAS/SATA RAID Controller and eventually 8 drives. Suggestions, comments or warnings? You input is much appreciated. Jim Maki [email protected]
